Monday June 6th 2016, 9-17:00 at the Walker Art Center as part of the Eyeo Festival

Electronic Textiles (E-Textiles) combine traditional textile materials, tools and techniques with electrical engineering practices. These processes often require a mixed set of tools from both disciples in order to work material into it’s final textile form while knowing about it’s electrical properties.

This workshop will be an introduction to e-textiles with an emphasis on the tools and processes used to create them. Participants will start by each assembling a hybrid hand tool for textile manipulation that has the functionality to measure electrical resistance built in. For example a crochet hook that doubles as an Ohm meter, indicating when you’ve reached a set electrical resistance between two points on the piece of conductive crochet you’re creating. With the assembled tools in hand, we will draw upon the “How To Get What You Want” textile sensor library to create a selection of textile sensors from a range of conductive, resistive and piezoresistive materials.

The content of this workshop should be interesting for beginners as well as those with experience in either textiles or electronics, or both. For beginners in electronics this workshop will demonstrate the relationship between Voltage, Current and Resistance (Ohm’s Law) in a very hands-on way. For beginners in textiles this workshop will show you how to create and tailor a variety of textile sensors to your needs. And for those who already have experience working in e-textiles this workshop can be an opportunity to discuss the possibility of creating tools that support our practice.

OUTLINE:
• Introduction to electronic textiles – materials, tools and techniques.
• Assemble a custom tool to measure/visualize/sonify electrical resistance.
• Use the tool to explore a range of conductive, resistive and piezoresistive materials and to work these into a selection of textile sensors, for example: crochet pressure sensor, knit stretch sensor, beaded tilt sensor, stitched stroke sensor, layered bend sensor, embroidered potentiometer….
• Opportunity to hack/modify/improve the tools that were made in the workshop.
• Demonstration that shows how the analog values of these textile sensors can be read into a computer using an arduino.
• Discussion on tools, techniques and processes for working with electronic textiles.